The Swinburne encyclopedia of radio pulsar astronomy allows anyone to
learn about the radio pulsar population, explore the pulsars in the
ATNF pulsar catalogue, and even see real observational data suitable
for actual professional research via the Swinburne Pulsar Portal hosted
by the Gravitational Wave Data Centre via ADACS, funded by Astronomy Australia Limited.
In the plots below it is often possible to click on a particular pulsar, and
be taken to the pulsar portal to see real obser vations of it. For now
only observations from SARAO's MeerTime project are available for viewing.
According to version 1.67 of the ATNF catalogue there are 3320 pulsars now known. 336 of these pulsars are binary. 32 of these are extragalactic, 191 are associated with globular clusters, and the remaining 3097 are thought to be part of the galactic plane's population. 1544 of these pulsars have profiles available in the Swinburne Pulsar Portal.
The shortest-period pulsar is J1748-2446ad with a spin period of 1.396 milliseconds and the longest-period pulsar in the catalogue is J0250+5854 with a period of 23.535 seconds.
Pulsars rotate very regularly, and to help visualise their distribution astronomers often plot them in equatorial coordinates:
Because pulsars are a galactic population it is often handy to plot their distribution in galactic coordinates.
Pulsar astronomers often like to plot the P-Pdot diagram that shows both how rapidly a pulsar spins, and how fast it is slowing down (in seconds/second). A pulsar's characteristic age is a rough measure of how old it is, and is equal to P/(2Pdot).
A pulsar's dispersion measure gives rise to a frequency sweep as the pulse arrives at Earth, and the slope is proportional to the integral of the free electron column density along the line of sight. An electron content model of the galaxy can be used to estimate the distance to the pulsar and we can plot their locations in 3D space.